When I was growing up there, North Gulfport was referred to as ‘Little Vietnam’ because of the perception of crime and depravity within its borders – as if its denizens were simply a congregation of the downtrodden.
Because conscription appeals to essentially no one, the United States has lived with the All-Volunteer Force since the end of the Vietnam War.
I felt only a conservative president could bring peace in Vietnam ’cause he wouldn’t be accused of being soft on communism.
I guess I just don’t see America as separate from Vietnam or Ethiopia. This mentality of ‘our team’s better than yours’ – it’s a high school idea. My kids don’t see those dividing lines, and I don’t want to either.
When you have a democratically elected president of Iran you don’t topple him for the Shah. You don’t help topple Arbenz in Guatemala. You don’t do what we did in Vietnam, etc.
Lyndon Johnson may have escalated the war, but when I was drafted and shipped off to Vietnam, the signature on my orders was Nixon’s.
In 2003, Congress authorized the construction of a visitor center for the Vietnam Memorial to help provide information and educate the public about the memorial and the Vietnam War.
When I was growing up, it was a bad time to be in the military. It was the time of Vietnam, but I was never called up.
The U.S. invaded Vietnam because many in our government – Lyndon Johnson’s best and brightest – imagined it could impose a government on that country that would provide a buffer against China and stop the supposedly rolling dominos of Communism.
Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.
Coming of age in the 1960s, I heard the word ‘fascist’ all the time. College presidents were fascists; Vietnam War supporters were fascists. Policemen who tangled with protesters were fascists – on and on.
The first ‘Bad Company’ was a kind of reaction to the Vietnam war – or at least a reaction to how Vietnam had entered the cultural life through films and books.
In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.
Moms and daughters can negotiate over anything, and they can go on longer than it took to settle the Vietnam War.
Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.
‘In Country’ is about a high school girl’s quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born.
I’m not so sure that people consider homelessness to be as important as, say, the Vietnam War. One should never even try to equate them because, of course, they’re tragedies on both sides of the coin.
In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.
My fascination with war is because my dad was in World War II, and my brother was in Vietnam.
In China, Vietnam, Russia and several former Soviet states, the dominant social networks are run by local companies whose relationship with the government actually constrains the empowering potential of social networks.
What America did in Vietnam and the Congo – we feel. And as a result come these demonstrations. I am not defending the act of burning USIS books. We deplore it. But we can understand the motives of the students.
I wrote a novel about the combat experiences I didn’t have in Vietnam.
The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the ‘New York Times’ or the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C.
I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.
During my first tour of Vietnam, John Steinbeck and his wife were there and we had Christmas dinner together.
I think the new generations in America, the America’s youth, no longer care about Vietnam. They don’t want to hear any more about it.
Most of my stuff was sort of of-the-time. ‘The Crazies’ was, basically, we were angry about Vietnam, and it had a reason for being.
I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.
I thought the Vietnam war was an utter, unmitigated disaster, so it was very hard for me to say anything good about it.
Life was so cheap in Vietnam. That is where my sense of urgency comes from.
If there were only one place to eat, I would pick anywhere in Northern Vietnam where you get the French and Vietnamese culinary fusion.
My father was a Vietnam vet, and he was Green Beret.
Vietnam and India are not just special friends; we also have a similar economic vision and approach.
There’s such a connection between Vietnam and America, but it should be one of friendship. Not bitterness. Not enemies.
What is in the Constitution is the burning desire and aspiration of all the people of Vietnam. So for the moment, we don’t think about opposition parties.
Proponents of change within Vietnam’s government know their country will be more stable and prosperous if it continues to open up. But principled arguments don’t always carry the day.
In our fervor to halt the potential spread of totalitarianism, what incredible precedent are we setting in Vietnam? By marching our legions through the countryside of foreign continents, burning homes, laying waste to the land, and indiscriminately killing friend and foe alike?
I’ve been to Vietnam and mainland China. Even though the Vietnamese are seemingly poor, they always stop in front of red traffic lights and walk in front of green ones. Even though mainland China’s GDP is higher than that of Vietnam, if you ask me about culture, the Vietnamese culture is superior.
One of the sharp parallels is that neither Vietnam nor Iraq was the slightest threat to America’s national security.
People that spend time in a foxhole – they’re never going to find that relationship anywhere else again… Everything else pales next to that. When you think about the Second World War vets – more than even the Vietnam vets – there’s a brotherhood.
During the Fifties, political and military activities in Vietnam were heavily influenced by the French, who as recent colonial masters, made all-important decisions.
I spent about seven years during the Vietnam War flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force. And then I went in and I had a lot of fun building airplanes that people could build in their garages. And some 3,000 of those are flying. Of course, one of them is around-the-world Voyager.
Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant ‘whiz kids’ tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.
I remember serving in Vietnam in that war, and many of us at the major Lieutenant Colonel, colonel level were frustrated that no one in the U.S. wanted to debate it that way.
I learned a lot from Vietnam veterans, especially as some of them turned against their own war.
Fonda was neither wrong nor unconscionable in what she said and did in North Vietnam.
Are there really good wars and bad wars? We thought so during World War II, and in retrospect, we were right. But in Vietnam, and Iraq we were wrong.
Having grown up as a young Army officer in the Vietnam era, I had an instinctual sort of notion that you have to look very carefully and weigh very carefully what anyone says.
Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, ‘The Things They Carried’, has won every award, is studied in college and is considered to be definitive. But it’s fiction.
Emmy Lou Harris introduced me to the work of the Vietnam Veterans of America foundation and the Campaign for a Land Mine Free World.
World War II was just as dirty and brutal as Vietnam, just as confusing.
For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.
I went to Kent State basically to avoid going to Vietnam, I had no idea what I was doing in the world. I was lost, and trying not to get into a fight every day.
Historians partial to Kennedy see matters differently from those partial to L.B.J. Vietnam has become a point of contention in defending and criticizing J.F.K.
Members of Congress concerned about human rights in Vietnam are right to maintain a healthy skepticism about its government’s intentions.
From Matthew Brady and the Civil War through, say, Robert Capa in World War II to people like Malcolm Brown and Tim Page in Vietnam. There was, seems to me, a kind of war-is-hell photography where the photographer is actually filming from life.
Like many Americans, I am still haunted by images from the last days of the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975. Newscasts showed South Vietnamese desperately trying to scale the walls of our embassy in Saigon to board the last helicopter flights out of the country. The fear in their eyes was chilling.
